The title applies as well to the ruthless downsizer, or corporate hitwoman, at Constant Consumer magazine as to the "freaky little mouse" whose demotion sets her off on a literal killing spree, with a fast-growing collection of bodies in the basement. The directorial debut of still photographer Cindy Sherman, whose leanings along this path were perhaps mapped out in her "Untitled Film Stills" series of self-portraits in the late Eighties, is a kind of camped-up Repulsion, a dilettantish dabble in a vein mined with utmost dedication by Curtis Harrington (What's the Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, The Killing Kind, Ruby). The plotting bogs down in the elementary question of who's next; the decomposition humor is fashionably black; and the flashback intimation of incest is drowned out in the swelling chorus all around it (The Sweet Hereafter, Eve's Bayou, U Turn, A Thousand Acres, et al.). But the movie unmistakably has an eye -- cropped faces at the edges of the screen, off-center compositions, out-of-focus foreground objects, windows and doors as within-the-frame framing devices, a patterned veil of shadows laid on top of an image, the overall oiliness of the color -- and it has, if for no other reason, an air of sophistication. Carol Kane, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Molly Ringwald, Barbara Sukowa. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
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